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Defects4J -- version 3.0.1

Defects4J is a collection of reproducible bugs and a supporting infrastructure with the goal of advancing software engineering research.

Contents of Defects4J

The projects

Defects4J contains 854 bugs (plus 10 deprecated bugs) from the following open-source projects:

* Due to behavioral changes introduced in newer Java versions, some bugs are no longer reproducible. Hence, Defects4J distinguishes between active and deprecated bugs:

• Active bugs can be accessed through active-bugs.csv.

• Deprecated bugs are removed from active-bugs.csv, but their metadata is retained in the project directory.

• Deprecated bugs can be accessed through deprecated-bugs.csv, which also details when and why a bug was deprecated.

We do not re-enumerate active bugs because publications using Defects4J artifacts usually refer to bugs by their specific bug id.

The bugs

Each bug has the following properties:

• Issue filed in the corresponding issue tracker, and issue tracker identifier mentioned in the fixing commit message.
• Fixed in a single commit.
• Minimized: the Defects4J maintainers manually pruned out irrelevant changes in the commit (e.g., refactorings or feature additions).
• Fixed by modifying the source code (as opposed to configuration files, documentation, or test files).
• A triggering test exists that failed before the fix and passes after the fix -- the test failure is not random or dependent on test execution order.

The (b)uggy and (f)ixed program revisions are labelled with <id>b and <id>f, respectively (<id> is an integer).

Reproducibility

Java version

All bugs have been reproduced and triggering tests verified, using Java 11 (see the CI configuration for specifics). Using a different version of Java might result in unexpected failing tests and/or non-reproducible bugs.

Timezone

Defects4J generates and executes tests in the timezone America/Los_Angeles.

If you are using the bugs outside of the Defects4J framework, set the TZ environment variable to America/Los_Angeles and export it. Not setting this option results in unexpected failing tests!

Broken and Flaky Tests

Defects4J excludes broken tests (tests that reliably fail on the fixed and the buggy version) and flaky tests (tests that intermittently fail on the fixed or buggy version).

If you are using the bugs outside of the Defects4J framework, make sure to verify expected test behavior for your environment.

Metadata

We recommend using Defects4J through the provided command-line interface. All reproducibility tests within Defects4J rely on this interface. If you are using the bugs outside of the Defects4J framework, make sure to use the Defects4J export command to obtain relevant metadata such as source/test directories, classpath entries, and sets of tests.

Setting up Defects4J

Requirements

• Java 11
• Git >= 1.9
• Subversion (svn) >= 1.8
• Perl >= 5.0.12
• cpanm

Defects4J version 2.x required Java 1.8.

Defects4J version 1.x and 0.x required Java 1.7.

Perl dependencies

All required Perl modules are listed in cpanfile. On many Unix platforms, these required Perl modules are installed by default. The setup instructions immediately below install them if necessary. If you do not have cpanm installed, use cpan or a cpan wrapper to install the perl modules listed in cpanfile.

Steps to set up Defects4J

1. Clone Defects4J:

   • git clone https://github.com/rjust/defects4j

2. Initialize Defects4J (download the project repositories and external libraries, which are not included in the git repository for size purposes and to avoid redundancies):

   • cd defects4j
   • cpanm --installdeps .
   • ./init.sh

3. Add Defects4J's executables to your PATH:

   • export PATH=$PATH:"path2defects4j"/framework/bin ("path2defects4j" points to the directory to which you cloned Defects4J; it looks like "/user/yourComputerUserName/desktop/defects4j".)

4. Check installation:

   • defects4j info -p Lang

On some platforms such as Windows, you might need to use perl "fullpath"\defects4j where these instructions say to use defects4j.

Using Defects4J

Example commands

1. Get information for a specific project (commons lang):

   • defects4j info -p Lang

2. Get information for a specific bug (commons lang, bug 1):

   • defects4j info -p Lang -b 1

3. Checkout a buggy source code version (commons lang, bug 1, buggy version):

   • defects4j checkout -p Lang -v 1b -w /tmp/lang_1_buggy

4. Change to the working directory, compile sources and tests, and run tests:

   • cd /tmp/lang_1_buggy
   • defects4j compile
   • defects4j test

5. Some Defects4J commands take the project id as a command-line argument (possibly along with other arguments). Examples include info, checkout, and query. Note that info and query report information that is derived from the Defects4J metadata and do not require access to project files that are in the project's VCS.

   Other commands require a working directory, either set explicitly (-w command-line argument) or implicitly (executed from within a working directory). Examples include any command that requires access to files under version control, including source code and build files. This includes all commands that build or test the code (compile, test, coverage, mutation) and commands that return version-specific information (export).

6. The scripts in framework/test/ are examples of how to use Defects4J, which you might find useful as inspiration when you are writing your own scripts that use Defects4J.

Command-line interface: defects4j command

Use framework/bin/defects4j to execute any of the following commands:

Export version-specific properties

Use defects4j export -p <property_name> [-o output_file] in the working directory to export a version-specific property:

Export project-specific metadata

Use defects4j query -p <pid> -q <field_list> [-o <output_file>] [-D|-A] to generate a CSV file containing a set of requested metadata for each bug in a specific project.

By default, defects4j query returns a list of active bug IDs for a project. To request specific metadata, the -q flag should be provided with a comma-separated list of variables from the list below. For example, defects4j query -p Chart -q "report.id,report.url" will provide the a list of all active bug IDs, along with the bug report ID and bug report URL for each.

By default, defects4j query returns information on active bugs. The [-D] flag returns information only on deprecated bugs, while the [-A] flag returns information for all active and deprecated bugs.

To determine the methods that are changed between the buggy and fixed version of the code:

1. Add this line to your user-level git attributes file: *.java diff=java

2. Run git diff --no-index, for example git diff --no-index /tmp/lang_1_buggy /tmp/lang_1_fixed. In the output, every line starting with "@" gives the method name of a changed method.

Test execution framework

The test execution framework for generated test suites (framework/bin) provides the following scripts:

Mining and contributing additional bugs to Defects4J

We welcome your contributions to Defects4J! The bug-mining README details the bug-mining process.

Additional resources

Scripts built on Defects4J

Fault localization (FL)

• Scripts and annotations for evaluating FL techniques

Automated program repair (APR)

• Scripts and annotations for evaluating APR techniques
• Patches generated with the Nopol, jGenProg, and jKali APR systems
• Repair actions and patterns for Defects4J v1.2.0

Publications

• "Defects4J: A Database of Existing Faults to Enable Controlled Testing Studies for Java Programs" René Just, Darioush Jalali, and Michael D. Ernst, ISSTA 2014 [download].

• "Are Mutants a Valid Substitute for Real Faults in Software Testing?" René Just, Darioush Jalali, Laura Inozemtseva, Michael D. Ernst, Reid Holmes, and Gordon Fraser, FSE 2014 [download].

• "Challenges in Using Search-Based Test Generation to Identify Real Faults in Mockito" Gregory Gay, SSBSE 2016 [download].

• "Detecting Real Faults in the Gson Library Through Search-Based Unit Test Generation" Gregory Gay, SSBSE 2018 [download].

• "Defects4J as a Challenge Case for the Search-Based Software Engineering Community" Gregory Gay and René Just, SSBSE 2020 [download].

More publications

Implementation details

Documentation for any script or module is available as HTML documentation.

The directory structure of Defects4J is as follows:

defects4j
   |
   |--- project_repos:     The version control repositories of the provided projects (populated during initialization).
   |
   |--- developer:         Resources for Defects4J contributors.
   |
   |--- framework:         Libraries and executables of the core, test execution,
       |                   and bug-mining frameworks.
       |
       |--- bin:           Command line interface to Defects4J.
       |
       |--- bug-mining:    Bug-mining framework.
       |
       |--- core:          The modules of the core framework.
       |
       |--- doc:           Scripts and templates for the html documentation.
       |
       |--- lib:           Libraries used in the core framework.
       |
       |--- projects:      Project-specific resource files.
       |
       |--- test:          Scripts to test the framework.
       |
       |--- util:          Util scripts used by Defects4J.
       

Versioning information

Defects4J uses a semantic versioning scheme (major.minor.patch):

License

MIT License, see license.txt for more information.